An Oslo radio amateur group, working with Tanagra Space, got a European Space Agency satellite to recognize and launch the 1993 game Doom after catching the word in a voice command sent over the 23 cm band. It took seven attempts, shared with a group in Poland, and the command finally got through on the last two, on the same day in late July. The satellite “understood its assignment,” with the help of a matcher after the 27 MB onboard speech model transcribed the audio, returning a postcard with details of the launch.

The satellite, named OPS-SAT PRETTY and flying under the ESA’s OPS-SAT Space Lab program for outside experiments, ran the game in an experiment punningly called PRETTY DOOMed. Doom ran on a different satellite, the OPS-SAT-1, in 2023, but this time is different, as the game was launched with a voice command.

The radio club sending the command in question is LA4O, of the Norwegian Radio Relay League, hams transmitting as part of the experiment. The club’s signal went over 1296 MHz narrowband FM at about 80 W, indicated, using an Icom IC-9700 radio and a Wimo helix antenna at 15.1 dBi, directed by hand. As for the voice, Run 6, the morning pass, used a looped synthesized voice from a keyer, with three of six captures detecting the command. Run 7, the evening pass, used a live operator at a microphone, with one of five usable captures detecting it.

Source link